Inventing America on the Borders of Socialist Imagination: Movies and Music from the USA and the...

REGION: Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia 2(2): 249–88, 2013.

Inventing America on the Borders of Socialist Imagination: Movies and Music from the USA and the Origins of

American Studies in the USSR

Sergei I. Zhuk This essay explores how products of American culture, such as movies, liter-‐‑ature, and music during the 1940s and 1950s not only triggered interest in American history and culture but also contributed to the academic careers of Lev Zubok, Aleksei Efimov, and their students, such as Nikolai Bolkhovitinov.

The pioneers of American studies in the Soviet Union, such different scholars as Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, Nikolai Sivachev, and Robert Ivanov from Mos-‐‑cow, Aleksandr Fursenko from Leningrad, and Arnold Shlepakov from Kiev, who represented the post-‐‑war generation of Soviet historians, emphasized that the role of the United States of America as the main ally in the Second World War stimulated their interest in the study of U.S. history. At the same time, both Bolkhovitinov and Ivanov noted that American Western adven-‐‑ture films, such as Stagecoach starring John Wayne, which they watched dur-‐‑ing the late 1940s in Moscow movie theaters, and the American jazz music they listened to during their student parties also triggered their interest in American culture and history. Both acknowledged how impressed they were by the music performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra in the film Sun Valley Serenade, which they watched in Moscow in the late 1940s–early 1950s.1 Fursenko, Sivachev, and Shlepakov especially stressed how the dynamic and attractive images of American pirate movies starring Errol Flynn influenced their interest first in the literature on Anglo-‐‑American pirates and then on the colonization of America, and how the stories and images from the films Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and The Roaring Twenties, which they watched during their childhood, later pushed them in the direction of contemporary U.S. history.2 1 Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 18 May 1992; Robert F.

Ivanov, interview with the author, 21 May 1992. 2 Aleksandr Fursenko, interview with the author, 19 March 1991; Marina Vlasova,

interview with the author, 20 March 1991; Arnold M. Shlepakov, interview with the author, 29 August 1991.

250 Sergei I. Zhuk

Many years later the next generation of Soviet Americanists, who grew up during the 1970s and who were students of those pioneers of American studies like Bolkhovitinov and Sivachev, also noted the influence of Ameri-‐‑can movies and music on their tastes and scholarly preferences. As Viktor Kalashnikov and Andrei Znamenskii said, Westerns stimulated their interest in the social and cultural history of American Indians, while such American movies as Mackenna’s Gold and Little Big Man, shown in Soviet movie theaters during the 1970s, provided them with exotic images of “indigenous Ameri-‐‑cans” fighting against “the greedy white imperialist Americans.”3 During this same period, images from popular American films on the Soviet screen such as It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World; The Sandpit Generals; They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; The New Centurions; Bless the Beasts and Children; The Domino Principle; Oklahoma Crude; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; and Three Days of the Condor presented a leftist criticism of American realities that contributed to the growing interest in contemporary U.S. history, especially in the history of labor, politics, and political parties. Many young Soviet historians, repre-‐‑sentatives of the 1970s détente, students of Bolkhovitinov and Sivachev, scholars such as Marina Vlasova, Vladislav Zubok, and myself, were inspired not only by the new American movies but also by the sound of the new American music that they associated with Miles Davis, B. B. King, The Doors, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Grand Funk Railroad.4

As Fursenko noted, “the majority of the Soviet historians who never vis-‐‑ited the United States imagined and invented America; and these images of America simultaneously fit the anti-‐‑imperialist Soviet propagandist clichés and, at the same time, contributed to the creation of the exaggerated attrac-‐‑tiveness of remote America, the capitalist fantasy land. American movies and music, which became available to the Soviet audience after the Second World War, provided important material for this creation.”5 “Being limited in their research resources, Soviet Americanists,” Nikolai Bolkhovitinov added later, “became involved in a process of inventing America, responding to the offi-‐‑cial demands of the Soviet political system to study America as their official enemy. What these scholars offered to the system in response was very far from a realistic analysis of American life. In fact, they always constructed the controversial images of capitalist America on the borders of their socialist imagination. That is why we cannot understand Soviet studies of America without analyzing the elements of American popular culture—movies,

3 Andrei Znamenskii, interview with the author, 4 December 2010. 4 Vlasova, interview, 20 March 1991; and Vladislav Zubok, interview with the

author, 25 September 2012. Cf. my Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press; Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 8 and 9 about movies from the West on the Soviet screen.

5 Fursenko, interview, 19 March 1991.

The Origins of American Studies in the USSR 251

music, and literature—that lay behind the prevailing Marxist rhetoric in the historical imagination of Soviet scholars who studied the United States.”6

This essay, part of a larger research project on the social and cultural his-‐‑tory of American studies in the USSR, is an attempt to explore the process of “inventing America on the borders of socialist imagination” using the per-‐‑sonal stories of the pioneers of Soviet American studies, such as Lev Zubok, Aleksei Efimov, and Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov.7 Based on personal inter-‐‑views, memoirs, correspondence, and archival documents, this study focuses on the social and cultural influences in the 1940s and 1950s that shaped the intellectual interests of those representatives of the Soviet post-‐‑war genera-‐‑tion who were eventually to become the founders of the first Soviet research centers for American studies (Amerikanistika in Russian).8 This essay is an

6 Bolkhovitinov, letter to the author, 12 September 1993. 7 For American historians in the United States, Bolkhovitinov, together with

Sivachev and Fursenko, symbolized the new openness of the Soviet academic community and the serious research potential of American studies in the Soviet Union, which were revealed to the outside world as a result of Khrushchev´s Thaw, de-‐‑Stalinization, and the liberalization of Soviet society after 1956. For American historians’ praise of Bolkhovitinov, see Marcus Rediker, “The Old Guard, the New Guard, and the People at the Gates: New Approaches to the Study of American History in the USSR,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 48, no. 4 (October 1991): 580–97; John T. Alexander, “Catherine the Great and the Rats,” in Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present, ed. Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 54, 56, 58; Donald J. Raleigh, “A Journey from St. Petersburg to Saratov,” in Baron and Frierson, Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 145. See also the best biographical essay about Bolkhovitinov in Russian, B. N. Komissarov, “As otechestvennoi amerikanistiki [k 70-‐‑letiiu N. N. Bolkhovitinova],” in Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki: Sbornik statei, posviashchennyi 70-‐‑letiiu akademika Nikolaia Nikolaevicha Bolkhovitinova, ed. A. O. Chubarian (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2002), 8–33. Cf. my previous publications: Sergei I. Zhuk, “In Memoriam: Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1 (2009): 225–26; “Leveling of the Extremes: Soviet and Post-‐‑Soviet Historiography of Early American History,” in Images of America: Through the European Looking Glass, ed. William L. Chew III (Brussels: Free University of Brussels Press, 1997), 63–78; “Colonial America, the Independence of the Ukraine, and Soviet Historiography: The Personal Experience of a Former Soviet Americanist,” Pennsylvania History 62, no. 4 (1995): 468–90.

8 Bolkhovitinov’s first attempt to analyze the origin of American studies in the USSR through his autobiography appeared in English in 1980 as: Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” Journal of American Studies 14, no. 1 (1980): 103–14. After this first attempt at autobiography, Bolkhovitinov returned to writing his memoirs (now in Russian) only in 1990, toward the end of perestroika. He kept writing for many years, publishing excerpts in various collections and journals. See, e.g., N. N. Bolkhovitinov, “O vremeni i o sebe: Zametki istorika,” in Istoriki Rossii, vyp. 1 (Moscow: Skriptorii, 1997), 67–80, a small segment of the first draft of the memoirs. But the bulk of the work, which

252 Sergei I. Zhuk

attempt to take a new look at the interactions of the post-‐‑war Soviet genera-‐‑tion with Cold War culture and post-‐‑war Stalinist ideological practices, which have been described in recent literature.9 “Socialist imagination” be-‐‑came the most important part of the cultural practices of the post-‐‑war Soviet generation. Soviet youth “imagined and invented” their “socialist moder-‐‑nity,” comparing it to “the imagined West” or “imagined America,” being unable to visit a real Western Europe or America.10 For some scholars this imagined America was “a local cultural construct and imaginary that was based on the forms of knowledge and aesthetics associated with the ‘West,’ but not necessarily referring to any ‘real’ West, and that also contributed to ‘deterritorializing’ the world of everyday socialism from within.”11 Accord-‐‑ing to Juliane Fürst, the result of this socialist invention or imagination was the creation of a socialist “modernist” culture of late Stalinism as “a compli-‐‑cated conglomerate of performative practices, collective habits, individual mechanisms of survival, strategies of self-‐‑improvement, and segregated spaces for action, all of which were linked and interacted with each other in the person of the Soviet subject and citizen.”12 This essay explores these con-‐‑

Bolkhovitinov proofread for the last time in 2005, was never published. The text of these memoirs and his correspondence, which were given to me by Liudmila Antonovna Bolkhovitinova in 2010, represent unique sources for our understanding of the mentality and life trajectory of Bolkhovitinov, the informal leader of the most famous Soviet school in the study of US history at the Institute of World History, USSR Academy of Sciences. I use another text as a major source for this study: Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “Vospominaniia” (unpublished typescript, 2005).

9 See especially A. V. Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia ottepel´ (Moscow: OLMA-‐‑Press, 2002); Y. Gorlizki and O. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-‐‑War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

10 See Alan M. Ball, Imagining America: Influence and Images in Twentieth-‐‑Century Russia (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Litlefield, 2003), esp. 184–85.

11 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 34–35, 161–62. He begins a genealogy of this metaphor with Michel Foucault’s ideas. See Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: New Press, 1998), 312. See my polemics with Yurchak in Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, 13–14; and Zhuk, “Sovietologists and the Cold War,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War, ed. Artemy Kalinovsky and Craig Daigle (London: Routledge, forthcoming in 2014), 6: 342–44.

12 Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 26.


nections between the “socialist imagination” of late (post-‐‑war) Stalinism and the personalities of the future Soviet Americanists.

The Post-War Soviet Generation and the Images and Sounds of America

After many years of anti-‐‑American communist propaganda, suddenly, dur-‐‑ing the Second World War, Soviet young people, including Bolkhovitinov, Ivanov, and Georgii Arbatov (a future director of the Institute of the USA and Canada), were exposed to positive images of Americans on Soviet screens. In Soviet news reels and radio news Americans were shown as friendly allies of the Soviet people and as an industrious and innovative nation. Moreover, many Soviet people, whether at the front, like the young soldier Ivanov, or in Moscow, like the middle-‐‑school student Bolkhovitinov, experienced a direct connection to America and its people in the form of American products sup-‐‑plied as part of the lend-‐‑lease agreement. Packages with food from America were a significant part of celebrations in the Bolkhovitinov household. The positive images of America linked to these packages of canned meat, egg powder, or sweetened condensed milk were thus forever imprinted in the memory of Bolkhovitinov and millions of other representatives of his gener-‐‑ation who survived the war eating “the gifts” from America.13

One of Bolkhovitinov’s high school friends, Nikolai Arkhangel´skii, in-‐‑troduced him to the members of his soccer team, and the youngster began playing (very successfully) this popular game. (Later, Bolkhovitinov switched to volleyball, and sports of various types became a favorite pastime.) Arkhangel´skii also introduced Bolkhovitinov to other activities that were to shape his personality, among them cinema. As Bolkhovitinov recalled, during the late 1940s they watched various “trophy films” (trofeinye fil’my), foreign movies brought from Germany by the victorious Soviet forces after World War II. During the years 1947 to 1949 these films reached not only the larger provincial cities such as Odessa and Saratov, but even small towns and remote villages. While most of these movies were German, there were also many from the United States. Among Bolkhovitinov’s friends the most popular movies were these American films, especially Westerns (so-‐‑called “cowboy films”).14 13 Bolkhovitinov, “Vospominaniia,” 11–12. Cf. the similar reaction to American

lend-‐‑lease products described in the memoirs of Bolkhovitinov’s colleague from the Institute of World History, Evgenia V. Gutnova, Perezhitoe (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001), 229.

14 Bolkhovitinov mentioned this in all his interviews. On German “trophy films” released in the Soviet Union in 1948–49, see Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, rev. ed. (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 212–14. Many contemporaries, like former Soviet Americanists Leshchenko and Shlepakov, recall how they watched these films in small Ukrainian villages in

254 Sergei I. Zhuk

The favorite movie of all Moscow children in the 1940s was an American “cowboy film” entitled Stagecoach. Bolkhovitinov recalled how all of his friends, including Arkhangel´skii, fell in love with the main character of the movie, The Ringo Kid, and tried to imitate his tricks and behavior. Stagecoach was directed by John Ford and released in the United States in 1939. Later on it was bought by the Germans and released in Germany with German subti-‐‑tles. After Germany’s defeat, the Soviets took the film as a “trophy,” renamed it The Trip Will Be Dangerous, and released it in Moscow, describing it “as an epic about the struggle of Indians against White imperialists on the American frontier.”15 But Bolkhovitinov and his friends paid no attention to the ideological message of Soviet propaganda. They loved the adventures and dynamic story, so different from Soviet children’s films, which were boring, slow, and didactic. Moreover, it was the first American feature film to be shown at their neighborhood movie theater. Bolkhovitinov remembered that at first he and his friends considered the film to be German because of the German subtitles, but they soon realized that it was an American Western that had been subtitled in German. Two of the friends’ other favorite trophy films, The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood, were American movies starring Errol Flynn. These films, translated into Russian as Korolevskie piraty (The Royal Pirates) and Ostrov stradanii (The Island of Suffering), portrayed the romantic adventures of Anglo-‐‑American pirates in the Atlantic Ocean, and once again connected attractive and dynamic characters from the screen with the enig-‐‑matic America, “whose wonderful movies were more attractive and inter-‐‑esting than the boring and slow Soviet ones.” Of course, Soviet authorities were aware of some of the ideological implications, but in comments deliv-‐‑ered before screenings they stressed the films’ “anti-‐‑capitalist message,” and they censored all “controversial (from the ideological point of view) epi-‐‑sodes.”16

1948. See Leonid Leshchenko, interview with the author, 23 July 2012; and Shlepakov, interview with the author, 4 April 1991.

15 Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 15 December 1995; Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 125. For information about American films on the Soviet screen in 1957–80, see Val S. Golovskoy and John Rimberg, Behind the Soviet Screen: The Motion-‐‑Picture Industry in the USSR 1972–1982, trans. Steven Hill (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1986), 132–37, esp. 133. Golovskoy mistakenly dates the Soviet release of Stagecoach as early as the end of the 1930s. (This film was released in the USA only in 1939!) Cf. a description of Western movies in the USSR from the so-‐‑called trophy fund in Solomon Volkov, The Magical Chorus: A History of Russian Culture from Tolstoy to Solzhenitsyn, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Knopf, 2008), 175–76; and Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, 126–38, 358n13.

16 Bolkhovitinov, interview, 15 December 1995. Bolkhovitinov is referring to two Hollywood classics, both starring the legendary Errol Flynn. The Sea Hawk (1940) tells the story of Geoffrey Thorpe, a privateer, one of several Sea Hawks, who, on


During 1945–48, images of America and ideas related to the United States were always present in the Bolkhovitinov household. Nikolai Feodosievich, Bolkhovitinov’s father, who was a Soviet professor of material science at one Moscow college, always publicly praised (at least before 1948) the quality of metallurgical studies conducted in the U.S. and often used American scien-‐‑tific publications for his own research. Young Nikolai was aware of his father’s respect for the work of American scientists. When, during the Second World War, America became an ally of the Soviet Union, the Bolkhovitinovs listened to British radio broadcasts about political developments during the war years and discussed the role of the allies, especially the United States, in defeating the Nazis. During this same period, in addition to classic Russian literature, young Nikolai began reading American adventure classics for children: books by American authors that from pre-‐‑revolutionary times had been part of the traditional “must read” list of any intellectual Russian household. As Bolkhovitinov later recalled, two American writers were his favorites during the 1940s—James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain. “I read too much (of course only in Russian), but without any system, of whatever was in our home library,” he noted. “That is how I discovered Cooper’s nov-‐‑els about Nathaniel Bumppo. Then I read Cooper’s The Spy when I grew older, but I was not impressed with his writing. I preferred reading Mark Twain’s stories. But my childish images of America were based mostly on American Western films [such as Stagecoach], which my friends and I watched many times, and pictures from the old, dusty James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain volumes (in good Russian translation) I found in my parents’ library.”17 Eventually, Bolkhovitinov discovered that Nikolai Arkhangel´skii and his other friends also loved to read the American adven-‐‑ture classics, especially Cooper’s “novels about American Indians.” “My case was different,” he said as he commented on Cooper’s popularity among his friends. “Everybody read these American stories, but nobody knew the mod-‐‑ern history of Europe and the United States. Thanks to my reading of college

behalf of Queen Elizabeth I, keep the shipping lanes open. When he sinks a Spanish galleon carrying the new Spanish ambassador to England, Don José Alvarez de Cordoba, and his niece Doña Maria, the Queen is displeased since England and Spain are not at war. Thorpe and his compatriots are very wary of Spain and urge the Queen to build up the fleet. With the Queen’s tacit approval, Thorpe goes to Panama to capture his enemies’ treasure, but he and his men are betrayed. Brought before a Spanish court, they are sentenced to the galleys as slaves. Thorpe manages to escape with proof that the Spanish Armada is set to sail against England. The second film, Captain Blood (1935), was based on the famous novel by English writer Rafael Sabatini about the adventures of the pirate Captain Blood. For the tremendous popularity of this novel among the Soviet children, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, 116. See also the recent biography of Errol Flynn: Thomas McNulty, Errol Flynn: The Life and Career (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004).

17 Bolkhovitinov, letter to the author, 12 December 1996.

256 Sergei I. Zhuk

history textbooks, I knew this history pretty well. That is why I always had my own critical opinion about the fiction in Cooper’s stories, which I shared with members of our kompania.”18

In addition to cinema and American adventure classics, Bolkhovitinov and Arkhangel’skii enjoyed listening to foreign recordings of American pop-‐‑ular jazz and songs by the then forbidden Russian émigré bards Aleksandr Vertinskii and Petr Leshchenko.19 The music Bolkhovitinov discovered through his friendship with Arkhangel’skii became an important component in his intellectual development, triggering an interest in Western popular culture that continued after high school and into the 1950s, as he listened to recordings of Vertinskii and American jazz and, occasionally, to Voice of America radio broadcasts about jazz.20

The post-‐‑war period was a very difficult time for the Soviet people, with severe shortages of food and everyday necessities. Neighbors of the Bolkhovitinovs who were party bureaucrats or university professors sur-‐‑vived and prospered by undertaking “business trips” to defeated Germany. In order to qualify for these trips, such “specialists” had to prove their “ide-‐‑ological reliability” and “professional usefulness” for appropriating the tech-‐‑nology and equipment so desperately needed by the Soviet economy. To-‐‑gether with Soviet military personnel these “specialists” pillaged Germany, returning to Moscow with cars, jewels, modern clothing, furniture, record players, etc. In 1945–46 the adolescent Bolkhovitinov watched as his neigh-‐‑bors, contemptuously called sakvoiazhniki (travel-‐‑baggers) by his parents and their friends, transformed their apartments with luxuries lacking in his own home. It was the first of the young man’s unpleasant discoveries. He realized that, in contrast to the millions of impoverished Soviet citizens, including the ordinary soldiers who defeated Nazi Germany, a very few privileged sakvoiazhniki enjoyed a life of luxury (by his standards), surrounded by attractive modern goods from the West. Thus, for Bolkhovitinov, the notion of the capitalist West became directly connected to the style of the privileged elite in socialist society.21

18 Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 10 July 2004. 19 For the best Russian-‐‑language edition of Vertinskii’s memoirs, published during

the last year of perestroika, see Aleksandr Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu… (Moscow: Pravda, 1991). For information in English about his music, see David MacFadyen, Songs for Fat People: Affect, Emotion, and Celebrity in the Russian Popular Song, 1900–1955 (Montreal: McGill-‐‑Queens University Press, 2002), 22, 63, 87–113.

20 Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 13, 19–20. 21 Ibid., 15–16; and Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 21 March 1991. For

details about the Soviet elite in post-‐‑war Berlin, see the memoirs of Iren Andreeva, whose family was representative of that privileged class: Chastnaia zhizn’ pri sotsializme: Otchet sovetskogo obyvatelia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2009), 68–74.


Then, in the late 1940s, Bolkhovitinov and his friends discovered another American film, Sun Valley Serenade, which showed that “normal people in the capitalist West could live a stylish and attractive life,” the kind of life that only sakvoiazhniki could afford in post-‐‑war Moscow. This film also introduced American jazz to the Soviet movie screen.22 For the first time, Soviet filmgoers could see the Glenn Miller Orchestra playing live. For many children in the post-‐‑war Soviet Union, Sun Valley Serenade was not only advertising for such catchy jazz melodies as “Chatanooga Choo Choo,” but it also popularized the English language as a very attractive, modern, and stylish European lan-‐‑guage. Many representatives of the Soviet post-‐‑war generation, such as the future Americanists Bolkhovitinov and Sivachev in Russia and Shlepakov in Ukraine, decided to switch from German, then obligatory as the first foreign language in the Soviet school curriculum, to English. Bolkhovitinov said that after watching the film and listening to the Glenn Miller Orchestra, he began memorizing songs from the movie but was unable to pronounce the English sounds correctly because his first foreign language was German. That was why he and Arkhangel’skii decided to learn English.23

As Bolkhovitinov and his colleague Robert Ivanov recalled later, “during the first years after the war everybody who watched American films and used food products sent by the Americans understood that Americans were our allies and good friends; Soviet young people like us did not think at the beginning in terms of the Cold War at all.”24 Another graduate of the Mos-‐‑cow State Institute of International Relations (hereafter MGIMO) who stud-‐‑ied together with Bolkhovitinov recalled how strong the good feelings to-‐‑ward American people were among Soviet youth in the 1940s: “[O]ur feelings toward America were very warm. We knew that the United States was giving us substantial help with food and matériel.… Wartime movies from Hollywood were often shown, many of them depicting the friendship be-‐‑tween Americans and Russians. I felt sure we would always be friends; it was inconceivable that anything could come between the Soviet Union and the United States.”25

Meanwhile, the Cold War had begun, and its developments directly af-‐‑fected not only the ideological situation in the Soviet Union during the late 1940s but also the Bolkhovitinovs’ finances. The Soviet nuclear bomb project led to changes in official attitudes toward Soviet science and Soviet scientists. Stalin demonstrated a real interest in support of Soviet science, and sud-‐‑

22 Sun Valley Serenade is a 1941 musical film starring Sonja Henie, John Payne, Lynn

Bari, and Milton Berle. For a synopsis, see http://www.amazon.com/Sun-Valley-Serenade-Sonja-Henie/dp/6302136229 (accessed 31 May 2013).

23 Bolkhovitinov, letter, 12 September 1993. 24 Bolkhovitinov and Ivanov, interview with the author, 19 March 1991. 25 Arkady Shevchenko, Breaking With Moscow (New York: Knopf, 1985), 56.

258 Sergei I. Zhuk

denly, Soviet scientists acquired a privileged status in the Soviet hierarchy,26 becoming the wealthiest social class. As Bolkhovitinov recalled, his father’s salary as a full professor and chairperson at the technical college was raised to 6,200 rubles (at a time when the average salary of the Soviet citizen was no more than 100 rubles!). On top of that, Nikolai Feodosievich received an additional 3,000 rubles for his research. Moreover, he obtained official per-‐‑mission to purchase foreign literature and subscriptions to foreign journals in his field. Suddenly, the Bolkhovitinov family became part of Stalin’s scientific elite. In 1947, Nikolai Feodosievich bought the new Soviet car Moskvich for 10,000 rubles. A few years later he bought a new Pobeda for 16,000 rubles.27 The Bolkhovitinov family began leading a lifestyle enjoyed by only the priv-‐‑ileged few, the lifestyle that young Nikolai had observed among the families of the sakvoiazhniki.

Unfortunately, during these same years the ideological situation deterio-‐‑rated as the Cold War spurred anti-‐‑Western and anti-‐‑American campaigns in the USSR. The young Bolkhovitinov witnessed how, after 1948, under pres-‐‑sure from above, his father was forced to denounce his connections with his Western colleagues, sign a special public declaration about his withdrawal from foreign scientific societies, and publicly cancel his subscription to for-‐‑eign scientific journals. The Bolkhovitinovs silently observed how the new Stalinist purges affected their neighbors and friends: “Lysenko campaigns against Soviet geneticists,” “Zhdanov campaigns against A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko,” and anti-‐‑Semitic campaigns against “rootless cosmopoli-‐‑tans.” The abstract problems of genetics especially affected young Nikolai, because two of his close classmates were the sons of persecuted geneticists—professors Zhebrak and Sabinin. Nevertheless, despite the fact that he had been imprisoned as “an enemy of the people” during the Stalinist purges in the early 1930s, Bolkhovitinov’s father survived all these campaigns unharmed, maintaining his privileged position as a Soviet scientist while at the same time growing ever more skeptical and privately critical of the Soviet regime. The father’s skepticism and cynicism would profoundly influence the son’s mentality, as Bolhovitinov revealed in private correspondence written during perestroika: “[O]f course I grew up as the young Soviet loyal patriot in a privileged family, but the everyday (sometimes silent) skepticism of my

26 See also Aleksandr Nekrich, Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian, trans. Donald

Lineburgh (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 47; Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 16–17.

27 For information about Soviet cars, such as the Moskvich and Pobeda, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). Compare with Gutnova, Perezhitoe, 244–57.


father eventually pushed my perception of Soviet realities in a critical direction.”28

Another important influence on the young Bolkhovitinov’s personality was his school, Moscow School No. 218, with its relatively liberal atmos-‐‑phere. During his high school years (1946–48) he discussed with his class-‐‑mates and teachers various facts of the world and Soviet history, especially wars and revolutions, and the writings of his favorite Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was banned from the Stalinist school curriculum. During his free time he not only played soccer and volleyball, but also spent hours with his friend Arkhangel’skii listening to American jazz and songs by the émigré singers Vertinskii and Leshchenko. Denounced by a classmate for “listening to anti-‐‑Soviet music” and tarnished by the scandal this provoked in the school’s Komsomol organization, Bolkhovitinov and Arkhangel´sky nevertheless continued to enjoy their favorite music, though they stopped sharing their enthusiasm with their classmates. For many years to come Bolkhovitinov’s favorite saying would be a line from Vertinskii’s 1946 song “Songbirds” (“Ptitsy pevchie”). He would sometimes sing this line for his close friends and students: “We are singing birds […] [and] we can’t sing in a cage…” This phrase became his motto.29

According to contemporaries, during the Stalin era, when the study of history was transformed “into a simple ideological ritual justifying the vic-‐‑tory of communism in the USSR,” many Soviet intellectuals tried to avoid the “uncritical and boring pursuits of historical research” and devoted their energy to other less ideologically biased “intellectual fields of knowledge.”30 As Roger D. Markwick noted in his study of Soviet historiography, “history as a profession had very poor status” in Soviet society, only 2 percent of stu-‐‑dents chose to pursue history at the college level.31 Such a negative attitude toward history as a profession was especially obvious among the representa-‐‑tives of the Soviet “technological intelligentsia,” i.e., Soviet scientists and en-‐‑gineers.

28 Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 18–19; and Bolkhovitinov, letter to the author, 16

April 1990. 29 Bolkhovitinov, “O vremeni i o sebe,” 68; and Bolkhovitinov, letter, 16 April 1990.

Vertinskii wrote this song after his return from emigration in 1946. In Russian these lines read: “Мы—птицы певчие. Поем мы, как умеем… Мы—птицы русские. Мы петь не можем в клетке, и не о чем нам петь в чужом краю.” For the song lyrics, see Vertinskii, Dorogoi dlinnoiu…, 347.

30 Some of Bolkhovitinov’s colleagues, such as Ivanov and Fursenko, used these phrases in their interviews to characterize the traditional attitudes of Soviet intellectuals toward the historical profession during late Stalinism. Cf. Gutnova, Perezhitoe; Nekrich, Forsake Fear; and Aron Gurevich, Istoriia istorika (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004).

31 Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 67.

260 Sergei I. Zhuk

Bolkhovitinov’s father, who was one of those technological intelligents, thought that after graduating from high school his son would choose a seri-‐‑ous scientific field rather than scholarship in the humanities (especially in “the ideological brainwashing field of Soviet history”). As Bolkhovitinov wrote in 1979, his father “felt uneasy over” his decision to become a historian “but did not persist in his view, confining himself to a skeptical remark about ‘cult servants.’” Later, in 1991 Bolkhovitinov recalled that his father used much stronger words, comparing official Soviet historians to the “prosti-‐‑tutes” of the “cult.” Then Nikolai Feodosievich used his last argument to try to dissuade his son from joining. He reminded his son about the obligatory ideological requirements for Soviet students of history. Each Soviet student of history had to be ideologically reliable, and therefore had to be a member of the Komsomol (the Soviet political organization for youth) or Communist Party. Nevertheless, Nikolai, who had never belonged to any political or-‐‑ganization during his childhood, insisted on his choice. That is why on the eve of his graduation from school, Nikolai applied for membership in the Komsomol. Despite some criticism of his questionable taste in music, the majority of the Komsomol members supported his application, and in May 1948, for the first time in his life, Bolkhovitinov became a member of the Komsomol. He was now politically eligible to enter any Soviet establishment of higher education as a student of history.32

Bolkhovitinov, who was among the best students in his school, expected to graduate with honors (with a gold medal), which would have earned him the privilege of taking only one college entrance exam, in the subject of his specialty—history, while the typical applicant had to take three other en-‐‑trance exams in addition to the specialty exam. Unfortunately, he made one mistake in his final exam in Russian literature, which disqualified him from receiving the golden medal. Frustrated, he knew that he would have to take all four entrance exams. Nevertheless, he hoped to enter the department of history at one of the two most prestigious establishments of higher education in Moscow—Moscow State University (hereafter MGU) or MGIMO. He pre-‐‑ferred MGU, where the entrance exams were scheduled for August, but MGIMO offered the entrance exams as early as July. Bolkhovitinov decided to try his luck at MGIMO. To his surprise, he passed all four exams with good marks and was admitted as an undergraduate student at MGIMO’s department of history in August 1948.33

That same year, under the influence of American jazz and the Glenn Miller Orchestra, he decided to switch from studying German to English. Despite failing the English language exam during MGIMO’s first exam ses-‐‑sion in January 1949, he persevered in studying the new language, and by his

32 Bolkhovitinov, “O vremeni i o sebe,” 69; and Bolkhovitinov, interview with the

author, 2 July 1989. 33 Bolkhovitinov, “O vremeni i o sebe,” 69.


third year he had reached the proficiency level of his classmates who had been studying English since childhood. To some extent his perseverence can be traced to his sympathy for Americans that began during the Second World War, when the youngster had become “a very loyal ally” of the United States, tracking the movements of American troops on a map and listening to the speeches of American politicians on the radio. Bolkhovitinov’s interest in “everything American” was also stimulated, as already noted, by American movies as well as his father’s delight in and fascination with “the genius and inventiveness of the Americans” and “their achievements in building their modern and rational civilization.”34

The last important influence that pushed him toward studying the Eng-‐‑lish language and US history came from his MGIMO professors. During the period of Stalin’s campaigns against “rootless cosmopolitans,” many talented Moscow scholars lost their teaching positions at MGU and other Moscow universities and institutes. For some reason, the MGIMO administration, which strove to cover various fields of diplomatic studies and international history with professional lectures by good specialists, invited many of these scholars to teach in their fields of expertise at MGIMO.35 As a result, by 1948 MGIMO had historian-‐‑celebrities such as the specialist in French history E. V. Tarle and the expert in Russian premodern history L. V. Cherepnin. During the first year of his studies at MGIMO, Bolkhovitinov, who had already read Tarle’s book, attended his classes and was disappointed with his lectures, which turned out to be a mere “recapitulation” of old writings that the young and ambitious student had already learnt by heart. Hence Bolkhovitinov sought out new lecturers who could attract his interest and attention. Even-‐‑tually he discovered a constellation of brilliant scholars, MGIMO’s experts in US history, who systematically covered all major periods of American his-‐‑tory. As he explained later:

The course of lectures on the history of the USA for the students who chose this country as their specialty was read at that time by A. V. Efimov (up to the Civil War and Reconstruction), L. I. Zubok (1877–1918), E. V. Ananova (1918–45), and, lastly, N. N. Inozemtsev, a young man at the time (contemporary history and foreign policy of

34 Bolkhovitinov, interview, 21 March 1991. Cf. my interview with Liudmila

Antonovna Bolkhovitinova, 14 February 2011. 35 For details, see Gennadii V. Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov”: Vlast’ i

evreiskaia intelligentsiia v SSSR (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009). For more on these post-‐‑war MGIMO professors as “a brilliant galaxy of Russian scholars of the old school” in the memoirs of post-‐‑war MGIMO graduates, see Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 33; and Arkady Shevchenko, Breaking With Moscow (New York: Knopf, 1985), 60–68. See also Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 74, 103, 262.

262 Sergei I. Zhuk

the USA after World War II). They also conducted seminars on their respective periods. Undoubtedly, they formed the most qualified group of specialists on American history in the Soviet Union. It is not surprising, therefore, that many Soviet Americanists from G. A. Arbatov to N. N. Iakovlev were trained at the Institute.36 First, Bolkhovitinov planned to study contemporary U.S. history. From

early childhood he was used to analyzing newspaper articles and radio broadcasts about world politics and discussing this information with his father. He tried to do the same at MGIMO, but came to realize that it was not only difficult but even dangerous for his future studies and his reputation as a Soviet student of history. He wrote about his student experience:

I recall that once, during the seminar class, I delivered a report about the main features of international imperialism after the Second World War and attempted to formulate (taking into account contemporary developments in Western capitalist countries) some “additions and changes” compared to the famous five features of imperialism according to V. I. Lenin.37 Our professor immediately interrupted me and remarked that imperialism is a complete preparation for social-‐‑ism and between these two steps in the development of a society there is no intermediate stage, as Lenin said. From that time on I firmly de-‐‑cided to avoid any theoretical discussion about the current issues of present-‐‑day politics, and I concentrated [instead] on purely historical problems of the remote past.38 After this unpleasant experience, he decided to forget about contempo-‐‑

rary history, move to the field of nineteenth-‐‑century diplomatic history, and work with the MGIMO professor of history whose lectures most strongly drew his attention and triggered his strong interest in nineteenth-‐‑century U.S. history.

36 Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” 108. 37 Bolkhovitinov here refers to Lenin’s 1916 description of imperialism “as the

highest and the last stage of capitalism”: 1) monopoly (a corporation of a group of capitalists) replaces individual capitalists; 2) export of capital (money) prevails over export of manufactured goods; 3) financial capital (an accumulation of industrial money and banking funds in one capitalist corporation) becomes a dominant form of capital; 4) international corporations divide the global economy into their spheres of economic domination; 5) imperialist countries divide the world into political alliances. For the English translation, see The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, NY: Norton, 1975), 311–12.

38 Bolkhovitinov, “O vremeni i o sebe,” 69–70; and Komissarov, “As otechestvennoi amerikanistiki,” 10–11.


As Bolkhovitinov later confessed, “of all lecturers [at MGIMO] the great-‐‑est influence was exerted on me by Aleksei Vladimirovich Efimov.” He explained that Efimov’s “lectures seemed to be somewhat incoherent, nor was he too precise with reference to the facts, but all this was more than compensated for by the brightness of his ideas and his unexpected generali-‐‑zations. It was he who advanced the idea of the connection between the Monroe Doctrine and U.S. expansionism, which influenced first the choice of subject for my diploma work and later my thesis for the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences.”39 Bolkhovitinov saw in Efimov the image of an old noble intellectual from pre-‐‑revolutionary Russia, a man with a profound knowledge of the world and Russian history, and had established good rela-‐‑tions with him. Efimov, in turn, recognized in his student the talents of a good scholar and patient historian who loved to work with various sources in search of historical truth. Although all MGIMO graduates from the depart-‐‑ment of history specialized in contemporary twentieth-‐‑century history, Efimov supported Bolkhovitinov’s intention to devote his diploma work not to problems of current history, “but to the remote year of 1823, to the origin of the Monroe Doctrine.”40

By 1952, Bolkhovitinov had chosen two supervisors for his research work. One of them was Efimov, and the other—the legendary E. V. Tarle. Both were pleased with Bolkhovitinov’s thesis, and in April 1953 they, together with L. I. Zubok, the “informal reviewer,” declared the research and writing to be deserving of “high praise and full recognition.” Tarle discerned in the work “bits of sound ideas, especially singling out and approving the section enti-‐‑tled ‘The Absence of a Real Threat of Intervention by the Holy Alliance in Latin America,’” which was later used by Bolkhovitinov as the foundation for his first research article, published in 1957.41

Another MGIMO professor who played an important role in the intellec-‐‑tual development of Bolkhovitinov and many of his classmates, future Soviet Americanists, was Professor Zubok. As Bolkhovitinov later noted, “Lev Zubok was a real inspiration for all of us; he not only influenced us intellec-‐‑tually at the institute, but also protected us after graduation, helping us to find a journal for our publications or a safe place for our teaching jobs.”42

39 Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” 108. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 109; Bolkhovitinov, letter to the author, 16 April 1990; Bolkhovitinov, “K

voprosu ob ugroze interventsii Sviashchennogo soiuza v Latinskuiu Ameriku,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 3 (1957): 46–66.

42 Bolkhovitinov, interview, 18 May 1992.

264 Sergei I. Zhuk

The Communist Odyssey of Lev Zubok: From Philadelphia to Moscow

Lev Zubok was Bolkhovitinov’s first Soviet connection to both the realities of American working-‐‑class movements and to an Ivy League education. Lev Izraelevich Zubok was born on 16 (23) December 1894 in Radomyshl, a typi-‐‑cal Jewish town in the Ukrainian province of Zhitomir in the Russian Em-‐‑pire.43 Zubok grew up in a big, poor, Jewish working-‐‑class family. Working various part-‐‑time jobs, his father struggled to support his seven children. Lev was still a child when his father died from tuberculosis. His brothers and sisters were sent to a local school for orphans (sirotskaia shkola) until kindly relatives took the children from the orphanage and sent them to live with members of their extended family. This was during the very difficult and dangerous time of the first Russian Revolution. Eight-‐‑year-‐‑old Lev stayed with one of his relatives in Odessa, a big port and industrial city in southern Ukraine. Marveling at the child’s remarkable memory and enthusiasm for reading, his relatives decided in 1905 to send him to the highly regarded Odessa Commercial School (kommercheskoe uchilishche) and agreed to pay his tuition. Later, the school administration awarded him a scholarship in recog-‐‑nition of his accomplishments and intelligence.

As a rule, commercial schools charged very high tuition. Consequently, the majority of their students came from upper-‐‑middle-‐‑ and upper-‐‑class families. Male and female students took classes together for seven or eight years of intensive study. At the high school level these classes were usually devoted to subjects such as calculus, commodity research, technologies of production, accounting, book-‐‑keeping, etc. In comparison with other schools in Imperial Russia, commercial schools usually had better equipped build-‐‑ings, research laboratories, and other facilities, as well as superior financing.44

43 What follows is based on: Vladislav Zubok, interviews with the author, 12

December 2010, 25 January 2011, and 23 March 2012; Irina A. Beliavskaia, interview with the author, 7 March 1991; Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 15 May 2000; A. Z. Manfred, “Predislovie,” in L. I. Zubok, Ekspansionistskaia politika SShA v nachale XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), 5–10; B. D. Kozenko, “Lev Izraelevich Zubok (1896–1967),” in Portrety istorikov: Vremia i sud´by, vol. 2, Vseobshchaia istoriia, ed. G. N. Sevostianov, L. P. Marinovich, and L. T. Mil´skaya (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 359–68. Vladislav Zubok insisted on this version of his grandfather’s date of birth. Manfred, an old friend of the Zuboks, gave the same date of Lev Zubok’s birth—1894. Kozenko referred to another date—29 (or 28) December 1896.

44 Sergei I. Zhuk, “Commercial Schools in Late Imperial Russia,” Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet & Eurasian History (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 2005), 6: 182–83. See also F. F. Korolev, Ocherki po istorii sovetskoi shkoly i pedagogiki: 1917–1920 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii pedagogicheskikh nauk RSFSR, 1958); and M. F. Shabaeva and F. F. Korolev, Ocherki istorii shkoly i pedagogicheskoi mysli narodov SSSR: XVIII v.—pervaia polovina XIX v. (Moscow: Pedagogika, 1973). During the 1913–14 academic year, 260


Due to the diverse and demanding curriculum and high educational stand-‐‑ards, the level of general education and expertise of commercial school stu-‐‑dents was higher than that of students in the majority of schools (gymnasia and Realschule) under the control of the Ministry of Education. Commercial school graduates commonly entered institutions of higher commercial edu-‐‑cation or other colleges and universities.

In 1912 Lev graduated, having received an excellent education, but in-‐‑stead of looking for a job in Odessa, he decided to leave Russia for America. After the Revolution of 1905–07 and a series of pogroms in southern Ukraine, many local Jews sought to escape Russia and immigrate to the United States in search of a better life.45 Zubok was among them. In 1913 he signed a con-‐‑tract with a local sea captain and was employed as a sailor on a ship bound for America. According to Vladislav Zubok, his grandfather’s sponsors—wealthy relatives—decided to leave for Philadelphia at the same time. This may have contributed to his decision as well.46

Zubok settled in Philadelphia, where he worked in different capacities, beginning as an unskilled laborer and later working as a qualified industrial worker at Ford factories and Baldwin Mechanics plants. As early as 1915, he became an active participant in the working-‐‑class movement in Philadelphia, turning mainly to the leftist internationalist socialist group of local workers who rejected participation in World War I. In 1917, after the United States entered the war, Zubok, together with his socialist comrades, rejected the call to join the army and boycotted a draft campaign in Philadelphia. Between 1917 and 1924 he was among the most active organizers of the American trade union movement and worker strikes in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. As he modestly remarked decades later in his official autobiography, “many times during my stay in the US I happened to be a leader of proletarian strikes.”47 After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Zubok played an active role in the American League of the Friends of Soviet Russia and later in other

commercial schools of the Russian Empire with more than 55,000 students, including 10,500 girls, hired some of the country’s best teachers and educators, including a number of prominent scientists and pedagogues. The biologist Aleksandr Ia. Gerd, chemist Vadim N. Verkhovskii, and physicist Petr A. Znamenskii taught at commercial schools. Commercial schools became a part of the system of specialized education and contributed to the development of technical and economic education in Imperial and Soviet Russia.

45 See studies by John Kleer, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); as well as Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University; Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004).

46 Vladislav Zubok, correspondence with the author, 23 March 2012. 47 Manfred, “Predislovie,” 6.

266 Sergei I. Zhuk

organizations, such as the American Labor Alliance for Trade Relations with Soviet Russia.48 In 1919 he joined the Communist Party of the United States of America.

In 1916 Zubok attended classes at Temple University, refreshed his memory of what he had learned at the Odessa Commercial School, and then applied for a scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, to which he was admitted in 1918. He attended classes in history and social sci-‐‑ences there and got his BS degree in education in 1921. He graduated with his MA in American History the next year, in 1922. That same year the depart-‐‑ment of history accepted Zubok (Louis Zoobock in official documents) as a new graduate student, and the university awarded him a scholarship to write a Ph.D. dissertation in U.S. history.49

By 1919 Zubok had married a recent Jewish immigrant from Russia, Tsilia (Celia in American documents) Illinichna, who was also a dedicated com-‐‑munist and an active participant in the local communist and trade union movements. In addition, she took sociology classes at the University of Penn-‐‑sylvania with the goal of expanding her intellectual horizons. Meanwhile, Zubok combined his trade union activities with his studies at the university, where he successfully passed his doctoral exams in 1923–24 and began thinking about writing his dissertation. All the while both Lev and Tsilia dreamed of returning to Soviet Russia to take part in the building of the new communist society. As their grandson later recalled, Zubok wrote several letters to Soviet leaders, including Anatolii Lunacharskii, requesting permis-‐‑sion to go to Soviet Russia and work for the Soviet people.50

Thus Zubok’s university studies were interrupted when he suddenly received an official invitation from Solomon Lozovskii, the secretary-‐‑general of the Profintern (the Communist-‐‑controlled trade union international, part of the Communist International, Komintern), to join this organization in Moscow. After protracted negotiations between the Komintern leadership in Russia and American communists, Lev Zubok was sent to Soviet Russia as a representative of the Communist Party of the USA. During this long waiting period, Tsilia gave birth to the couple’s son Martin. Zubok obtained official permission (the so-‐‑called otkrepitel´nyi talon) from the Communist Party organization in Philadelphia for himself and his wife to leave for the Soviet Union and join the Soviet Communist Party. Zubok, with Tsilia and their infant son, arrived in Moscow in November 1924.51 That same year he joined

48 See Norman Saul, Friends or Foes?: The United States And Soviet Russia, 1921–1941

(St. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 5–43. 49 See Vladislav Zubok, e-‐‑mail correspondence from Zubok’s personal collection

[25 January 2011], Univeresity of Pennsylvania Records Center, Philadelphia, PA. 50 Vladislav Zubok, e-‐‑mail correspondence with the author, 21 March 2012. 51 B. Kozenko gave a different date for Zubok’s arrival—November 1925. See

Kozenko, Portrety istorikov, 360.


the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and was officially elected as a dep-‐‑uty of the English-‐‑American sector of the Profintern, where he worked till 1930. Suddenly an American graduate student and trade union activist had become a part of the ruling Communist elite in Moscow, with all the privi-‐‑leges of a Komintern apparatchik.52

Lev Zubok brought his American experience and his “American English” accent to his new life in Moscow. Because his spoken Russian was far from perfect, his first public lectures on the American working-‐‑class movement, for audiences in Moscow and Leningrad, were delivered in English. Not only communist apparatchiks but also university students fell in love with the democratic and engaging manner of the young “American” lecturer who spoke Russian with a “charming” accent and fluently in English. What is more important, Zubok shared his own experience as an American trade union organizer with his audience and readers. His first publication appeared in the February 1925 issue of The Workers Monthly next to articles by Gregory Zinoviev and William Foster, and it was reprinted in the USSR in Russian in 1927 as a chapter on American trade unions in a reference book about the international trade union movement.53

During the same period, Zubok began writing his new lecture course on the current history of the West, concentrating on the working-‐‑class history of the United States. In 1930 he stopped working in the Profintern, and after a year or so he became an official lecturer at Moscow State University (MGU) and the International Lenin School, where he lectured on current American history in English. Zubok was the first Soviet lecturer to develop a special lecture course on contemporary US history. In 1939, this course was approved by Soviet ideologists and published as the first Soviet textbook on the current (noveishaia) history of the Western countries. A year earlier, in 1938, Zubok had been appointed as a professor of history, and in 1940, he was awarded a doctoral degree in history (doktor istoricheskikh nauk; the high-‐‑est Soviet academic degree, higher than kandidat istoricheskikh nauk, the equiv-‐‑alent of an American Ph.D.) From this time forth Zubok concentrated on his academic career, conducting research on his favorite topics—the working-‐‑class movement in the United States and American diplomacy.

Using all the literature (in English, Spanish, and Russian) available from the central Moscow libraries, Zubok wrote his first big scholarly monograph about “the imperialist expansion” of the United States in the Caribbean

52 On similar developments among other Communist Jews, see Yuri Slezkine, The

Jewish Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Zubok, e-‐‑mail, 21 March 2012.

53 L. Zubok, “Amerikanskie profsoiuzy” in Malaia entsiklopediia po mezhdu–narodnomu profdvizheniu, (Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopedia, 1927), 37–38. Again, Vladislav Zubok directed me to the correct source.

268 Sergei I. Zhuk

region between 1900 and 1939.54 Despite its anti-‐‑imperialist, anti-‐‑American criticism and typical Stalinist clichés, this book was a serious Marxist study of U.S. diplomacy in a very important region of world politics. Until the 1960s Zubok’s book remained a classical Marxist model for Soviet research in the field of U.S. diplomacy and foreign politics.55 In contrast to many of his col-‐‑leagues, Soviet historians who never lived in the U.S., whose inadequate English was based only on reading, and whose research sometimes led to serious misunderstandings and misinterpretation of the events of American history and politics, Zubok demonstrated a good knowledge of both the English language and the realities of American politics and culture. Given his experience living in the US for more than ten years, he understood better than any of his historian colleagues the idioms of contemporary American English. As Nikolai Bolkhovitinov has noted, “Lev Zubok was the first and, probably, the only Soviet historian-‐‑Americanist, who had authentic knowledge of both the American English language and American politics during the 1940s.”56

But in 1949 Zubok’s Jewish ethnicity, “authentic” knowledge of American English, and experience living in the United States led to official accusations of “rootless cosmopolitanism” and a campaign against his recently published Imperialisticheskaia politika SShA v stranakh Karibskogo basseina. Many contem–poraries could not understand why such an anti-‐‑American book full of praise for “comrade Stalin” had became the object of official criticism. Zubok, who had worked at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Science and had taught at the prestigious MGIMO and MGU, was humiliated and criti-‐‑cized in front of his colleagues and graduate students. As future Soviet histo-‐‑rian-‐‑Americanist Robert Ivanov, an MGIMO undergraduate student in 1949, recalled, “student campaign activists, usually Party and Komsomol members, would open the floor against the more senior professors [like Lev Zubok], who were forced to sit on a platform slightly above the crowd. Even though professors often outwitted their accusers, ridiculing their heavy-‐‑handed arguments, the verdict of expulsion was usually set from the moment a vic-‐‑tim had been singled out.”57

The first criticism of Zubok came from experts in European medieval history who included his book on a list of pro-‐‑American “cosmopolitan devi-‐‑ 54 L. I. Zubok, Imperialisticheskaia politika SShA v stranakh Karibskogo basseina: 1900–

1939 (Moscow–Leningrad: Izdatel´stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1948). 55 Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “The Study of United States History in the Soviet

Union,” American Historical Review 74, no. 4 (1969): 1237. See also the opinion of one of Zubok’s former graduate students in M. Sirotinskaia, “Iubilei I. A. Beliavskoi,” Amerikanskii ezhegodnik 1995 (Moscow: Nauka, 1996), 10–11.

56 Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 21 May 2001. 57 Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 83–84. See also how another Americanist,

Bolkhovitinov, took Zubok’s classes at MGIMO: Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” 108.


ations” by Soviet historians. During the “joint meeting of the sector for medieval studies of the Institute of History at the USSR Academy of Sciences and the department of medieval history of MGU” on 23 March 1949, a histo-‐‑rian, I. D. Belkin, attacked Zubok: “[H]is recently published book says that American imperialism, beginning with the 1930s, re-‐‑armed, transformed it-‐‑self, and became peaceful imperialism; that this American imperialism came out against intervention, to assist other nations.” And Belkin concluded, “Does he want to do this or not? Professor Zubok, consciously or uncon-‐‑sciously, is doing this; therefore we can qualify him, considering all his pub-‐‑lished articles and actions, as a definite cosmopolite.”58

The next day, according to the official report, during a “closed” meeting of the MGU Department of History at which Zubok was not present, he was criticized for “praising the politics of American imperialism, [and] for calling it ‘a good neighbor,’ which supposedly had no goal of interfering in the domestic affairs of other nations.” The authors continued, “Following the bourgeois scheme, Zubok taught the history of U.S. imperialism according to the chronology of American presidents’ rule, removing [otryval] the issues of international politics from the class struggle.” In reality, this “anti-‐‑cosmopolitan” meeting lasted three days, 25–28 March 1949,59 and concluded with the recommendation that Zubok and other “cosmopolites” be fired, a recommendation officially approved by MGU rector professor Nesmeianov. Irina Beliavskaia, who became Zubok’s graduate student in 1947 and began her dissertation under his supervision at the Institute of History, was shocked when her mentor, together with 30 other professor-‐‑“cosmopolites,” lost his job in 1949. Zubok’s former employer, Solomon Lozovskii, was exe-‐‑cuted in 1949 along with the Jewish Anti-‐‑Fascist Committee members. According to Zubok family legend, only the interference of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, who was also Zubok’s student at the MGU department of history, saved Zubok from his inevitable arrest. In 1950 Beliavskaia success-‐‑fully defended the dissertation she had started under Zubok’s supervision, and her former mentor returned to the Institute of History.60

58 A. N. Goriainov, “Stenogramma ob´edinennogo zasedaniia sektora istorii

srednikh vekov instituta istorii AN SSSR i kafedry istorii srednikh vekov Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 23 marta 1949 g.,” in Odissei: Chelovek v istorii. 2007, ed. A. Gurevich (Moscow: Nauka, 2007), 309.

59 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, 32. 60 See the dokladnia zapiska about MGU’s party meetings presented by D. T.

Shepilov to M. A. Suslov on 12 April 1949 in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-‐‑politicheskoi istorii (hereafter RGASPI) f. 17, op. 132, d. 221, ll. 32–35; and a publication of this document in Gosudarstvennyi antisemitizm v SSSR: Ot nachala do kul´minatsii, 1938–1953, ed. A. N. Iakovlev and G. V. Kostyrchenko (Moscow: MFD, Materik, 2005), 322–25. Compare with “Iubilei I. A. Beliavskoi.” See also other documents denouncing Zubok in RGASPI f. 17, op. 118, d. 536, ll. 33, 47–49.

270 Sergei I. Zhuk

According to another historian and contemporary of Zubok’s, Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Zubok was one of those few scholars at the Institute of History who “virtually refused to repent” despite the tremendous pressure and con-‐‑stant threats. Nekrich described how “a graduate student of A. I. Narochnitskii’s by the name of Batueva wrote a criticism of specialist in American studies Professor Lev Izraelevich Zubok, accusing him of nothing less than being an ‘agent of American imperialism.’” As he recalled later in his memoirs, “The American studies scholar Lan was soon arrested. Zubok was forced to leave the Institute of History and all other institutions of higher learning where he had worked, including the history department at the uni-‐‑versity, but was able to remain at the Institute of International Relations of the Foreign Ministry thanks only, according to him, to the personal interven-‐‑tion of V. M. Molotov, whose daughter had at one time been one of Zubok’s students.”61 Moreover, this struggle against “cosmopolitan bourgeois influ-‐‑ences” in the Institute of History led to a strong influx of so-‐‑called “graduates of the Academy of Social Sciences,” experts in the history of the Communist Party and communist theory who were sent to “ideologically influence” the “deviant” historians and social scientists there. Instead of real experts, like Zubok, these “messengers” of the directive organs of the Communist Party became the first official organizers of the new departments in the Institute. The Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences prepared a special decree about this, published on 20 March 1953: “On the Scientific Activity and Status of Staff at the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of History.” Following this decree, the new department of the history of American countries was orga-‐‑nized at the Institute of History that same year by B. N. Krylov, who was one of the trained specialists in the theory of communist and working-‐‑class movements. Krylov never offered Zubok any position in his department.62

Aleksei Efimov’s Noble Russian Roots

The cultural background and life trajectory of Aleksei Efimov stand in sharp contrast to those of his fellow Americanist Zubok. While Zubok was a Jewish self-‐‑made intellectual from the lower-‐‑classes of Ukrainian Jewish shtetl soci-‐‑ety, Efimov came from a purely Russian, Orthodox Christian, middle-‐‑class

61 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, 30, 33, 35. See also pp. 39, 43 47–48, and 57. He referred to

V. I. Lan, who was criticized for “distortions” in Marxist-‐‑Leninist approaches to diplomatic history in his 1947 study of U.S. political history between the two world wars. See Veniamin I. Lan, SShA ot pervoi do vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1947). Cf. another Soviet historian’s recollections of the same campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans,” Gurevich, Istoriia istorika, 34–35.

62 See Nekrich, Forsake Fear, 72; Bolkhovitinov, interviews with the author, private collection; and Robert Ivanov, interviews with the author, private collection.


intellectual family with ancient roots in the service nobility (sluzhiloe dvorianstvo).

Aleksei Vladimirovich Efimov was born on 18 (30) January 1896 to the wealthy and respected family of a Russian lawyer who had settled in Baku—in those days a multicultural urban center of one of the Russian Trans-‐‑Caucasian provinces, now Azerbaijan. One of Efimov’s great-‐‑grandfathers was peasant serf Tikhon Efimov from Tver´ province, near Moscow. During his service in the Russian army, Tikhon was promoted to the rank of officer, which not only freed him from serfdom but also gave him noble (dvorianskii) social status. As a member of the Russian service nobility, Tikhon Efimov was privileged to send his only son, Nikolai, to a prestigious military naval school. Upon graduating, Nikolai Efimov embarked on a brilliant career in the navy, participating in various maritime expeditions and military cam-‐‑paigns abroad. Eventually he was promoted to the rank of admiral. Accord-‐‑ing to family legend, during one of his travels abroad, Admiral Nikolai Efimov met a beautiful Danish girl in Copenhagen, fell in love with her, and brought her to Russia. She converted to Orthodox Christianity and they mar-‐‑ried. She gave birth to four healthy sons, one of whom was Vladimir, the father of Aleksei Efimov.63

Vladimir Efimov, viewed the legal profession as “boring” and “unro-‐‑mantic,” and dreamed all his life of another career—that of a naval officer. Thus stories about maritime adventures, books about naval expeditions, and pictures of famous sailors and adventurers became part of everyday life at the Efimov house in Baku. As a result of this romanticization of life at sea, finding himself on the deck of a sailing ship, young Aleksei Efimov decided to become a naval engineer. A very gifted student, he graduated from the Tbilisi gymnasium with honors in 1913 and was admitted to the St. Peters-‐‑burg Technological Institute, where he studied engineering. When the war with Germany began the next year, Efimov decided to join the Russian Impe-‐‑rial Navy and serve his country. In 1916, after finishing his third year at the Technological Institute, he was admitted without exams to the special war-‐‑rant officers/midshipmen (Michman) school at the Admiralty. After graduat-‐‑ing from Michman school on 11 September 1917, Efimov was drafted into the

63 What follows is based on my extensive conversations and interviews with

Bolkhovitinov, his wife, Liudmila A. Bolkhovitinova, and others: Bolkhovitinov and Liudmila A. Bolkovitinova, interviews with the author, 29 June 1997, 15 May 2000, and 14 July 2001; Ivanov, interview with the author, 30 June 1997; Beliavskaia, interview, 7 March 1991; Sergei N. Burin, interview with the author, 12 May 1992. I used also material from the following publications: R. F. Ivanov, “Aleksei Vladimirovich Efimov (1896–1971),” in Portrety istorikov: Vremia i sud´by, vol. 2: Vseobshchaia istoriia, ed. G. N. Sevostianov, L. P. Marinovich, and L. T. Mil´skaia (Moscow: Nauka, 2000), 369–81; and Bolkhovitinov, “O tvorcheskom puti i nauchnoi deiatel´nosti Alekseia Vladimirovicha Efimova,” in Problemy istorii i etnografii Ameriki, ed. Iu. V. Bromlei (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), 6–9.

272 Sergei I. Zhuk

navy and took part in maritime battles as a young naval officer. Then the events of the October Revolution of 1917 interrupted his naval career, and he had to leave the demoralized Navy and a chaotic life in revolutionary Petro-‐‑grad. He returned to his parents’ house in Baku. Then, according to the offi-‐‑cial Soviet account of Efimov’s biography, he resumed his studies at Baku University, and then reappeared in 1922 as a graduate student in the depart-‐‑ment of history at MGU. The years 1917–22 are not covered.64

As Efimov’s close friends knew, his life was always in serious peril because of this period.65 According to information from Efimov’s former stu-‐‑dents and friends, to whom he told his story in later years, in 1917–18 he was enrolled as a student in the department of history at Baku University. In the fall of 1918 he quit school and joined a group of patriotic Russian students who participated in the defense of Baku against the attacking troops of Ger-‐‑mans and Ottoman Turks. According to Efimov, he was wounded and his knee was badly injured. But local Russian senior officers, his “brothers in arms,” decorated the young man for his heroism by promoting him to the rank of lieutenant in the Russian (obviously not Bolshevik) army and awarding him the order of St. Anna and the order of St. George. After a long period of recuperation, Efimov moved to Moscow in 1919, where he enrolled in the MGU department of social sciences, from which he graduated in 1922.66

Later, at the end of his life, during private conversations with his favorite students, such as Bolkhovitinov and Ivanov, Efimov sometimes deviated from his old story. In another version of these events, in 1918, as a young naval officer, he joined a group of Russian patriots in Baku who had decided to make their own contribution to “the liberation of Russia from German-‐‑Bolshevik occupation.” This group left Baku and moved to the Northern Caucasus where (we still do not know the details) they were forced (accord-‐‑ing to Efimov’s account) into service in the Voluntary Army (Dobrovol´cheskaia Armiia) of General Alekseev (later, of General Denikin). Thus, for more than a year, from the end of 1918 to the end of 1919, Efimov was fighting against the Red Army as a soldier of the White Army. Eventu-‐‑ally, after being wounded in battle, he left the Whites and joined the Reds.

64 See how Robert Ivanov, one of Efimov’s students, described this period in his

essay “Aleksei Vladimirovich Efimov,” 369–70. Cf. Bolkhovitinov’s account in “O tvorcheskom puti,” 6. Ivanov also participated in the 1979 collection with his essay about problems of American capitalism in Efimov’s works: Robert F. Ivanov, “Problemy istorii amerikanskogo kapitalizma v trudakh A. V. Efimova,” in Problemy istorii i etnografii Ameriki, 16–23.

65 I tried to find some official documents, including KGB reports, about this period of Efimov’s life. But, for understandable reasons, the KGB files are not open for researchers. What follows is based mainly on my interviews with Bolkhovitinov, Ivanov, and Burin.

66 This is a story that Efimov told Bolkhovitinov.


Efimov, a former White soldier, an opponent of “Soviet power” who fled the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and who fought against the Red Army in 1918–19, suddenly appeared in Moscow in the fall of 1919, settled there and enrolled as an undergraduate student in the department of history at MGU. According to the official records, since 1917 Efimov had had a serious illness, a strange knee infection that led to knee-‐‑joint inflammation and left him with a limp (which is why he walked with a cane all his life). According to rumors, this illness was the result of his wound from his service in the Civil War.67

The story is still unclear. But as Bolkhovitinov noted, it looks as if the Soviet secret police permitted Efimov to continue his studies at MGU under certain conditions. After the Civil War, during the 1920s, many former White officers and soldiers, former enemies of the Bolshevik regime, were recruited by the OGPU (the Soviet secret police, a predecessor of the NKVD and KGB) to become secret agents. In exchange, they were granted forgiveness and permission to return to their motherland. Sergei Burin, a junior colleague of Bolkhovitinov from the sector of US and Canadian history, gave another explanation for Efimov’s strange arrival in Moscow. According to him, Efimov was wounded in battle and imprisoned by the Reds in 1919. After an interrogation, when the Red officers agreed to let him live and promised their support, Efimov agreed to collaborate with the Soviet army and police. We still have no idea what kind of price he paid for this agreement. But accord-‐‑ing to Bolkhovitinov, this strange episode in Efimov’s biography haunted him all his life. As a result of his Civil War wound, Efimov limped and was eventually exempted from military service.68

The Soviet government took care of the young Aleksei Efimov during his student years in Moscow. When he graduated in 1922 with a degree in his-‐‑tory, local party and GPU officials promoted his career. Until 1925, Efimov worked as a researcher at the prestigious and ideologically important Museum of the Revolution and simultaneously taught various courses on world history to former workers and peasants who had been accepted as students at MGU. Through the support of Communist Party officials, in 1925 he was sent to a post-‐‑graduate program (aspirantura) at the Institute of His-‐‑tory of the Russian Association of Scientific Institutes for Research in the Social Sciences (RANION). By the time he graduated in 1930, Efimov had become one of the most respected young Marxist historians in Moscow. His major scholarly interest was the genesis of capitalism in modern Europe and North America.

After finishing his post-‐‑graduate schooling, Efimov was sent to teach social sciences and history at colleges in Rostov-‐‑na-‐‑Donu, a provincial Rus-‐‑

67 Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 29 June 1997; and Burin, interview

with the author, 12 May 1992. See how Ivanov explained the reasons for Efimov’s limp in Ivanov, “Aleksei Vladimirovich Efimov,” 370.

68 Bolkhovitinov and Burin, interview with the author, 12 May 1992.

274 Sergei I. Zhuk

sian city far away from Moscow. Eventually, with the support of his GPU connections, Efimov returned to Moscow in 1933, where he received the new job of senior researcher at the Communist Academy. The next year, in 1934, he obtained a new position as an associate professor of modern history at the MGU Department of History. That same year he published his first and most influential scholarly book, which became the first serious study of U.S. his-‐‑tory (before the period of Reconstruction) to appear in the Soviet Union. Using the published secondary sources available in Moscow libraries and American literature, Efimov attempted to write a survey history of capitalism in the United States, covering the major stages of its development—from the colonial period to the Civil War and the Reconstruction. He addressed the major problems in the history of American capitalism, which would become the most popular themes in the Soviet historiography of America. These included the problems of American free lands and Indian wars in the history of capitalist relations, social struggle from colonial times to the Civil War, the genesis of slavery, the causes of the Civil War of 1861–65, the peculiarity and stages of American industrialization, and the expansion of the United States. Efimov’s major goals in this book were to reject the theory of exceptionalism in American history and criticize the idea of the special distinctive role of the United States in world history. At the same time, showing U.S. history as an example of capitalist modernity, Efimov stressed the progressive revolution-‐‑ary traditions of class struggle by ordinary Americans that would eventually lead to the creation of a higher and more humane level of universal moder-‐‑nity—communism.69

This book made Efimov a rising star in Soviet studies of modern history. In 1936 he was appointed as a senior researcher at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences (where he was the chair of its modern history sector for several years). After two years, in 1938, he defended his doctoral dissertation, which was based on material from his book. That year he was promoted to the position of full professor of history in the MGU Department of History, and the next year he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, a very prestigious position in the Stalinist hierar-‐‑chy of Soviet scholarship. In addition, Efimov also succeeded as a writer of the first and very popular school textbooks on the modern history of Western Europe and America. His school textbook for the eighth grade covering the modern history of Western capitalist civilization from 1640–1870 was pub-‐‑lished in 1940 and was adopted by the Soviet system of education as an offi-‐‑cial model textbook, which, after many revisions, was used by all Soviet schools until the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1941–43 he served as chair of the MGU Department of History. This was the peak of his academic career.70

69 Aleksei V. Efimov, K istorii kapitalizma v SShA (Moscow: Sotsekgiz, 1934), esp.

246, 248. 70 Bolkhovitinov, “O tvorcheskom puti,” 6–7.


Efimov’s Russian patriotism, rooted in his family’s Orthodox Christian nobility and naval traditions, proved problematic in his career. He always demonstrated his pride in “being a Russian intelligent” and sought “to build a bridge between pre-‐‑Revolutionary Russian intellectual traditions and Soviet intellectual and cultural developments.”71 As a consequence, Orthodox Marxist scholars sometimes attacked him for his “Great Russian nationalism” and alleged anti-‐‑Semitism. It is noteworthy that such Jewish historians as Lev Zubok never complained about Efimov having anti-‐‑Jewish attitudes. On the contrary, Zubok praised the intellectual abilities and open-‐‑mindedness of Efimov, who became his colleague and good friend.72

As some researchers have noted, the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 had almost immediately heightened the already blossoming prewar tendency of many […] Soviet historians to enhance the russocentric, nationalist dimension of their interpretations of the past and to defend the scholarship of earlier non-‐‑Marxist Russian historians, including aspects of the statist approach. This tendency had been encouraged from above since the mid-‐‑1930s, as part of the Stalin-‐‑inspired backlash against the Pokrovskii school [in Soviet historiog-‐‑raphy], now subjected to serious if guarded criticism for its lack of national spirit. But once the war had begun, both historiography and the arts […] were even more prepared […] to transform past Russian rulers, statesmen, and military leaders into progressive representa-‐‑tives of Russia’s achievements and even harbingers of the accom-‐‑plishments of the Soviet Union and its supreme leader.73

According to Reginald Zelnik and Yuri Slezkine, the Russian Empire’s

annexation of peripheral territories and peoples in centuries gone by, already viewed by Soviet historians as a “lesser evil” […] in relation to Georgia, Ukraine, and a few other areas, was […] proclaimed by some writers […] to have been a positive good, an accomplishment that was tied to the current defensive war with Germany […], with

71 Both Bolkhovitinov and Ivanov mentioned this phrase: Bolkhovitinov and

Ivanov, interview, 19 March 1991. 72 Both Ivanov and Beliavskaia mentioned this in a conversation with me: Ivanov,

interview, 30 June 1997; and Beliavskaia, interview, 7 March 1991. 73 Reginald E. Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet

Historiography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 31–32. For more, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, chaps. 7–9; and Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

276 Sergei I. Zhuk

Imperial Russia’s expansion newly valorized as a precondition for the USSR’s ability to withstand the onslaught of Nazi armies.74

Efimov, who was chair of the department of history at MGU during 1941–43, shared similar views. As some of his Marxist colleagues from the department complained, at the department’s meetings Efimov often lectured them that “at a time when the very survival of the Soviet Union depended on its alli-‐‑ance with the main bourgeois democracies—the United Kingdom and the United States—it was counterproductive to disparage the Russian past or the scholarly work of Russia’s earlier bourgeois historians.” In April 1942, Efimov organized a special public session of Soviet scholars in Moscow to celebrate the 700-‐‑year anniversary of the great victory of the Russian prince Aleksandr Nevskii over the German Crusaders of the Teutonic Order on Chudskoe Lake in 1242, an event which always played an important patriotic role in Russian historical consciousness, and which had a particular reso-‐‑nance with the patriotic feelings of the Soviet people after their recent victory over Nazi troops at the Battle of Moscow. Supported by the Soviet govern-‐‑ment and NKVD, Efimov invited many provincial Soviet historians and Muscovites to participate in this important patriotic event. In his presentation he reminded his audience of the importance of remembering the achieve-‐‑ments of Russian society from Kievan Rus´ to the present, including the pre-‐‑revolutionary successes of political leaders, intellectuals, and ordinary people who had created and passed down “a great Russian state, army, navy, cul-‐‑ture, scholarship, and science” to the new Soviet generation.75

But not everybody was happy with the “Great Russian patriotism” of the new chair of the MGU Department of History. When Efimov tried to criticize his Marxist colleagues for their dismissal of non-‐‑Marxist pre-‐‑revolutionary historiography, he was viciously attacked and denounced by one of them, Anna Pankratova, a prominent Communist and very orthodox Marxist histo-‐‑rian (known as a “reformer” of Soviet historiography after 1956), in her letter of 25 September 1942 to the ideological authorities.76 She accused Efimov of demonstrating “the trend to a conciliatory attitude toward, or even a revival of bourgeois ideology.” Pankratova informed Soviet ideologists such as E. M.

74 Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova, 32. See also Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and

the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 50–51, 282.

75 Iu. S. Kukushkin et al., eds., Istorik i vremia: 20–50-‐‑e gody XX veka. A. M. Pankratova (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo RUDN and Mosgorarkhiv, 2000), 222–23; Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova, 32; and Bolkhovitinov, “O tvorcheskom puti,” 7. I quote Robert Ivanov’s interview as well: Ivanov, interview, 30 June 1997.

76 Kukushkin et al., Istorik i vremia, 222–23. See also a study about Soviet “revisionist” historiography after 1956 and Pankratova’s role in Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 4, 10–13, 38, 49, 50, 59, 60.


Yaroslavskii that her colleague Professor S. V. Bakhrushin had complained about Efimov. In her letter she described in detail her conversation with Efimov on 24 September 1942 at the Institute of History:

There was a discussion provoked by Efimov’s objections to the gen-‐‑eral political and methodological introduction of my editorial article from the collection of essays Soviet Historical Scholarship for 25 Years. Professor Efimov began his objections saying that we are leading our fight against Hitler on the united front together with bourgeois Eng-‐‑land and America; that in our country there was built a moral and political unity of society, which, in his opinion, means an inclusion of both the old bourgeoisie and even the churchmen [tserkovniki] in this common unified front in the struggle [against Nazi Germany]. There-‐‑fore he considers it harmful (even in a scholarly and theoretical arti-‐‑cle) to raise the issue of the formation of Marxist-‐‑Leninist historical theory as a result of the struggle against the bourgeois ideology and methodology. At the same time, he had decisively objected to the very mentioning of the fact [in my article] that, for example, Kliuchevskii and Miliukov could not define the general concept of historical pro-‐‑cess, declaring that this would mean that we had rejected our [histori-‐‑ographical] “inheritance,” and we would look in the eyes of Western Europe and America like a country without its own historical scholar-‐‑ship before [the] October [Revolution]. He also pointed out that my approach contradicts the task of revising history, which [the Com-‐‑munist Party] now requires […]. Besides the theoretical confusion ap-‐‑parent in Professor Efimov’s misunderstanding of the fact that the moral and political unity in our country was a direct result of the liquidation of the bourgeois classes and a tireless struggle against the bourgeois ideology, I consider very wrong and dangerous the educa-‐‑tion of our student youth in the spirit of conciliatoriness with the bourgeois methodology (and Professor Efimov is Chair of the MGU Department of History), education based on the rejection of the strug-‐‑gle against this [methodology], and the “rehabilitation” of the old bourgeois historiography from this non-‐‑Marxist position.77 In February 1944 Pankratova sent a special letter to A. A. Zhdanov, com-‐‑

plaining of the ideological trends personified by Aleksei Efimov. According to her, these trends were based on the complete rejection of Marxism-‐‑Leninism and “the pushing-‐‑through [protaskivanie]—under the flag of patri-‐‑otism—of the most reactionary and backward theories, concessions to vari-‐‑ous Kadet and more obsolete and reactionary notions and evaluations in the field of history, a rejection of the class approach in history, a replacement of 77 Kukushkin et al., Istorik i vremia, 222–23.

278 Sergei I. Zhuk

the class principle in social development with nationalism, a rehabilitation of idealism, Panslavism, etc.” She especially noted Efimov’s idea that the con-‐‑cept of class struggle inside the country is not expedient nowadays because “we do not dream today to betray our country to the world of ‘decaying’ capitalism.” According to Efimov, “the major line of demarcation that exists now is between the countries struggling for independence and those coun-‐‑tries which are fighting to enslave other nations.” Pankratova also explained to Zhdanov that the former students of “Kliuchevskii’s school” began a revi-‐‑sion of the entire historiography. These revisionists grouped together under the name of the academician V. P. Potemkin and were being led by A. Efimov and A. I. Iakovlev. They had already introduced their historical interpreta-‐‑tions based on non-‐‑Marxist positions: “Proceeding from the notion that the Russian people played the important role in our history, they propose to revise the role of tsarist diplomats, generals, and statesmen, portraying them as progressive public figures in our history.”78 On 12 May 1944 Pankratova wrote a new letter to the Central Committee of the communist party—Stalin, Zhdanov, Malenkov, and Shcherbakov—accusing her colleagues from the MGU Department of History, especially Efimov, of “the revival of Great Rus-‐‑sian chauvinism.” She mentioned all previous conflicts with Efimov, empha-‐‑sizing his non-‐‑Marxist ideas and rejection of the necessity of the socialist rev-‐‑olution for “the united coalition of democratic western countries fighting to-‐‑gether against fascism.”79

As Reginald Zelnik later commented in his essay about Pankratova, although Pankratova “saturated” her writing

with expressions of her wartime patriotism and the need for histori-‐‑ans to contribute their energies and talents to the “Great Fatherland War,” Efimov had charged that Pankratova had presented much too negative a view of Russia’s pre-‐‑Soviet historians—Kliuchevskii, Miliukov, and others—at a time when Soviet historians should be uniting around the glories of the Russian past and demonstrating to

78 Ibid., 223–24. Pankratova especially complained of Efimov’s support (as the chair

of MGU’s kafedra novoi istorii) of S. K. Bushuev’s research on Aleksandr M. Gorchakov, the Russian diplomat who fought against Germany in the 19th century. According to her, it was a very nationalistic, pro-‐‑Russian research work. Nevertheless, despite this fact, Efimov nominated the “nationalist” Bushuev for the Stalin Prize in history writing.

79 Ibid., 228–36. See the text of this letter in Arkhiv RAN/AN SSSR f. 697, op. 2, d. 83, ll. 1–10ob. Pankratova was enraged when Efimov proposed to remove the very orthodox Marxist definitions and interpretations from Pankratova’s publications, including ideas about socialist revolutions in “the post-‐‑War Orient” and capitalist and non-‐‑capitalist developments in the developing post-‐‑colonial countries, and add new ideas about the new “progressive” role of the United States of America, etc.


the Soviet Union’s newly acquired allies the achievements of past Russian scholarship.80

Some of Pankratova’s friends joined her in this campaign of denunciation be-‐‑hind Efimov’s back, accusing him of “white guard” counterrevolutionary in-‐‑tentions and an anti-‐‑Marxist “mood” (belogvardeiskie kontr-‐‑revoliutsionnye namereniia i anti-‐‑marksistskoe nastroenie). Some of them called him “a former tsarist officer” and a “class enemy.” Only the interference of the NKVD lead-‐‑ership, which “protected him for some reason,” and Efimov’s remarkable award in 1942—the Stalin Prize for his participation in writing and editing of the first volume of A History of Diplomacy—saved him from arrest and exile. This confrontation with his orthodox Marxist opponents in the department of history resulted in his resignation from the position of chair in 1943. Until 1944 he taught at MGU, where he continued to lead the department (kafedra) of modern and contemporary history. In 1944 Efimov moved to the Institute of Educational Methods at the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, far from the field of American history and his ultra-‐‑orthodox Marxist historian colleagues. Moreover, in an attempt to escape the campaign of denunciation, Efimov moved with his family from Moscow to the city of Molotov (Perm) in 1945, where he worked as the chair of the department of modern and con-‐‑temporary history at the local university till 1947.81 Despite the constant criti-‐‑cism of Efimov’s “noble Russian roots,” many of his orthodox Communist historian colleagues who considered themselves to be his ideological oppo-‐‑nents nevertheless had tremendous respect for his historical erudition and his knowledge of US history. One such colleague was I. S. Galkin, a chair of modern and contemporary history in the MGU Department of History. I. Dementiev, a Soviet Americanist of the post-‐‑war generation and dissertation student of Galkin’s, recalls in his memoirs how one day in 1953, after a long discussion about various schools of history writing in the USA, a tired Galkin suggested to his student, Dementiev, that he ask Efimov for help with “com-‐‑plicated issues of modern US historiography”: “I can’t help you anymore, I don’t know, I am confused with all your [foreign names like] Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner; it would be better to send you to Professor Efimov.” Dementiev was surprised because he knew how Galkin disliked Efimov and tried to avoid him in public. Galkin, who came from a very poor peasant family and joined the Red Army during the Civil War, was suspi-‐‑cious of Efimov for having been a cadet and fought in the White Army against the Reds. But Galkin wrote a personal letter to Efimov, asking him to

80 Zelnik, Perils of Pankratova, 33. 81 Bolkhovitinov, “O tvorcheskom puti,” 7; Bolkhovitinov, interview, 15 May 2000;

and Ivanov, interview, 30 June 1997.

280 Sergei I. Zhuk

help Dementiev. After reading this letter, Efimov agreed to work with his ideological opponent’s doctoral student.82

In 1947 Efimov’s pedagogical works, especially his popular textbooks on modern (novaia) history written for high school and college students, brought him a new award—he was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Efimov returned to Moscow with his fam-‐‑ily and resumed his teaching, but this time as a professor of history at MGIMO rather than at MGU. At the end of the 1940s he began teaching US history on a regular basis at this new and very prestigious Soviet institute created to prepare future Soviet diplomats and experts in the history of for-‐‑eign affairs and diplomacy. Together with Lev Zubok, who joined him later, Efimov taught the first post-‐‑war generation of future Soviet Americanists, who took his classes in US history during the late 1940s and through the 1950s. All the most prominent figures in Soviet Amerikanistika, including the founders of the first Soviet centers of American studies, such as G. Arbatov, N. Bolkhovitinov, R. Ivanov, V. Mal´kov, N. Iakovlev, and Iu. Zamoshkin, were his students.83

The Year 1953 and Beyond

1953, the year of Bolkhovitinov’s graduation from MGIMO, was a remarkable year in his life. Before his graduation, at the beginning of March, Bolkhovitinov, together with his classmates Viktor Mal´kov and Robert Ivanov, went to see the dead Soviet leader Joseph Stalin lying in state. After Stalin’s death on 5 March, his body was displayed for a few days in the Palace of Unions, and citizens were required to pay their respects to the dead leader. Thousands of people flooded the streets around the palace waiting for their turn. At one point, when the gathering was especially crowded, a stam-‐‑pede broke out, and many people were trampled or killed. Bolkhovitinov’s reaction was similar to what Russian poet Evgenii Evtushenko experienced when he saw people “crushed against streetlights, telephone booths, and military trucks stationed to control the crowd […]. The sides of trucks were slick with blood. Police and young soldiers watched helplessly from the trucks, since they had no instructions.” Bolkhovitinov shared with Evtushenko the same “savage hatred for everything that had given birth to that criminal stupidity of the authorities.”84 After this experience and a long

82 See I. P. Dementiev, “Il´ia Savvich Galkin,” in Portrety istorikov: Vremia i sud´by,

vol. 4: Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, ed. G. N. Sevostianov (Moscow: Nauka, 2004), 105–23.

83 Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” 103–06. 84 Bolkhovitinov, letter to the author, 8 December 1987. The quotations are from

Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 45–46. The author used the following book: Yevgeny


conversation with his father on 9 March 1953, Bolkhovitinov realized that his Soviet patriotism, based on blind love of the “great leader,” was deficient. As he later explained, he still believed in the socialist ideal of his great Mother-‐‑land, but “the images of Stalin and the people who were killed during Stalin’s funeral did not fit his socialist ideal anymore.” Bolkhovitinov’s skep-‐‑ticism about the Soviet political system was rooted in these reactions to the tragedy of March 1953, though to some extent, the foundation for his attitude had been prepared by long and sincere conversations with his father and Pro-‐‑fessor Efimov. After 1953, Bolkhovitinov tried to avoid “ritualistic Marxist quotations” in his writing on U.S. history, a feature of his work that drew the ire of some Americanist colleagues, who complained that “he never quoted either Stalin or Khrushchev, and very rarely Karl Marx in his publications.”85

Another event of 1953 made a strong impression on Bolkhovitinov as well. In the late 1940s, his friends had sung the praises of the trophy film Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), starring Johnny Weissmuller as the ape-‐‑man Tarzan, who travels from the jungles of Africa to Manhattan in search of his kidnapped son.86 Although Bolkhovitinov’s friends had seen the movie many times, for some reason he had missed it. In May 1953, after finishing an exam, he joined his classmates at a movie theater that was showing the film. As Bolkhovitinov remembers it, everyone was fascinated with the portrayal of the ape-‐‑man’s adventures in Africa and New York City, but he was frus-‐‑trated by his classmates’ delight. “The plot of the movie appeared very childish to me,” he recalled later. “My age (I was 22 years old) probably did not allow me to embrace the Tarzan film as some impressive product of cin-‐‑ematic art.” What did impress him was not the adventures of Tarzan but the portrayal of “the great American urban megapolis” on the silver screen, with the unique cityscape of skyscrapers and shops and streets full of fashionably dressed and modern looking people. “It was a real shock to me,” he said. “Before this film I had seen modern stylish clothing and furniture only in the homes of those lucky people who brought this stuff from Germany after the war and in the pictures in those rare Western journals that my father occa-‐‑sionally brought to our house. Now I recognized these elements of modern style in this Tarzan movie as well. For the first time in my life I realized that

Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew (London: Collings and Harvill, 1963), 89–92. On various reactions to Stalin’s death, see also Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation, 121–26.

85 Bolkhovitinov, letter, 16 April 1990. The last quotation is from my conversation with his colleagues from the Institute of World History (the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow) (Robert Ivanov and Sergei Burin, interview with the author, 19 March 1991).

86 For a synopsis, see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarzan%27s_New_York_Adve nture>. On this film in the USSR, see also Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 125–26; and Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 40, 41. Cf. Alex Vernon, On Tarzan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 40, 96, 172.

282 Sergei I. Zhuk

the United States of America was the precise location of what we called in those days modernity and style [sovremennost´ i stil´].”87

The second shock for Bolkhovitinov was the movie’s portrayal of the American court and American judicial system. First, he could not understand the nuances of Tarzan’s trial. He confessed that he watched the film twice trying to understand how the U.S. judicial system worked and how it dif-‐‑fered from the Soviet one. After watching the movie he had a long discussion about these differences with his father, who ended up recommending that he listen to American radio broadcasts. This was the resurrection of a long-‐‑standing tradition in the lives of the Bolkhovitinovs (they used to listen to British radio during the 1940s)—from 1953 onwards Nikolai Bolkhovitinov listened to foreign radio stations on a regular basis. The KGB jammed West-‐‑ern radio stations that broadcast in Russian, but it did not jam broadcasts in foreign languages, so Bolkhovitinov listened to English-‐‑language programs. Since the best signal for local radio receivers in Bolkhovitinov’s neighbor-‐‑hood came from the BBC, listening to the BBC World Service became a favorite part of this MGIMO student’s everyday routine. Through his entire life Bolkhovitinov listened to “the radio from the West.” After 1956, he also listened to Voice of America’s news broadcasts. He freqently emphasized to classmates and colleagues that listening to English-‐‑language radio programs was important for improving one’s language skills, and therefore future his-‐‑torians of diplomatic relations should do this on a regular basis in order to “it enhance their professional experience and broaden their intellectual horizons.”88

During the early 1950s many young intellectuals in major industrial cities all over the Soviet Union discovered attractive images of the stylish way of life, interesting fashions, and the music, sounds, and rhythms in those American movies that portrayed contemporary life in US. Both Bolkhovitinov in Moscow and Shlepakov in Kiev recalled how they were im-‐‑pressed by the films Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and The Roaring Twenties. The first film, directed by Frank Capra and released in the USSR under the title The Dollar Rules, presented Soviet audiences with a handsome Gary Cooper and the new urban fashion that the most advanced, stylish tailors in both Moscow and Kiev tried to imitate.89 The second movie, directed by Raoul Walsh in 1939, was renamed A Soldier’s Fate in America and became the first American gangster film on the Soviet screen. The fashions and music, espe-‐‑cially the song “Melancholy Baby,” created a sensation among young Soviet

87 Bolkhovitinov, interview with the author, 4 March 1990; and Bolkhovitinov,

letter to the author, 17 September 1989. 88 Bolkhovitinov, letter, 17 September 1989. This quotation is from this interview:

Ivanov, interview with the author, 6 September 1998. 89 For a synopsis, see <http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Deeds-Goes-Town-Remastered/dp/B001

GLX6US/ref=atv_dvd_twister>, accessed 11 June 2013.


intellectuals,90 as Shlepakov recalled: “[F]or everybody in my class, to look like an American became fashionable, to look and dress like heroes from that movie was very cool and stylish.”91 For his part, Bolkhovitinov realized that he “had to know more about this country where everybody was so intelli-‐‑gent, stylish and cool,” admitting that “the direct result of these movies was my desire to study professionally the recent history of the United States.”92 Like the Tarzan movie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town impressed Bolkhovitinov with its portrayal of an American courtroom. This scene is a pinnacle of Capra’s movie, showing the workings of an American court and the “democratic” nature of trial by jury, which could result in the acquittal of an innocent per-‐‑son accused by corrupt lawyers. As another of Bolkhovitinov’s colleagues, Robert Ivanov, noted, the courtroom scene in this movie “resembled an American communist utopia”and fit “very well our images of the socialist justice that was absent from our Soviet realities in the 1950s.”93

Raoul Walsh’s film played a very important role in the lives of young Soviet students of American history like Bolkhovitinov and Shlepakov. Bolkhovitinov recalled how he loved to watch the historical introduction in this gangster film, with its detailed coverage of contemporary U.S. history from World War I through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the begin-‐‑ning of the New Deal era. He was impressed with the critical comments directed toward American realities: “[A] combination of the realistic por-‐‑trayal of unemployment, capitalist crises, gangster capitalism, and American greed, with illustrative episodes from American documentary films, were incorporated into Walsh’s movie and produced a tremendous effect on us young MGIMO students.”94 After watching this film Bolkhovitinov had seri-‐‑ous doubts about studying 19th-‐‑century U.S. history with Efimov and wanted to switch back to contemporary U.S. history. He explains,

I compared the facts from this film with what I had already read in Soviet books, like Lev Zubok’s study, and realized that the period of American history from 1919 to the present is the most attractive for any intelligent researcher. But when I told my father about my deci-‐‑sion to study contemporary U.S. history, he immediately killed my enthusiasm, explaining to all the difficulties in doing serious and de-‐‑cent research work on contemporary U.S. history in the atmosphere of

90 For a synopsis, see <http://www.amazon.com/Roaring-Twenties-James-Cagney/dp/B0006

HBV32/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie>, accessed 11 June 2013. For more information about these movies, see also Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 125.

91 Shlepakov, interview, 29 August 1991. 92 Bolkhovitinov, letter to the author, 12 May 1991; and Bolkhovitinov, interview

with the author, 5 April 1992. 93 Bolkhovitinov, letter, 12 May 1991; and Ivanov, interview, 6 September 1998. 94 Bolkhovitinov, interview, 10 July 2004.

284 Sergei I. Zhuk

anti-‐‑American hysteria which had begun in our country during the late 1940s. After this conversation with my father, I cooled my passion (ostudil moi pyl) and decided to stick with my topic of 19th-‐‑century U.S. history and the Monroe Doctrine. But paradoxically, even now, I still miss this opportunity to study the recent history of America, and I have a tremendous interest in this history and contemporary U.S. diplomacy, still inspired by U.S. movies such as Walsh’s film.95 Shlepakov and Nikolai Sivachev from Moscow were also impressed by

the critical portrayal of American capitalism in Walsh’s movie. As Shlepakov noted, “The portrayal of unemployment among American workers and gangster capitalism during the Prohibition era in this film fit all our Soviet ideological clichés about American capitalism perfectly. I would say that it was a graphic and very convincing illustration of all the atrocities of the con-‐‑temporary American capitalist system.” Under the influence of the film, Shlepakov decided to study “the problems of the working-‐‑class movement and capitalism in 20th-‐‑century American history.”96 Similarly, Sivachev’s graduate students recall that their mentor, who was usually quite cautious about praising American movies, liked Walsh’s film, explaining “how good and convincing the portrayal of the American road to the New Deal was in this old American feature film.”97 Fursenko also agreed that the film stimu-‐‑lated tremendous interest in contemporary U.S. history among representa-‐‑tives of his “post-‐‑war generation.”

We loved the main character of the film, a noble, loving, and strug-‐‑gling Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney) who became a gangster and eventually failed and died at the end of the film. But most important for us was the effect after watching this film—we liked all these American people who looked so humane and sympathetic to us, but at the same time we hated American capitalism, which transformed these people into its victims, making them criminals and destroying their human nature.98

Nikolai Bolkhovitinov emphasized similar feelings: American trophy films triggered among the Soviet public a very im-‐‑portant and strong interest in all American phenomena—politics,

95 Ibid. Similar facts were described in a different chronological order (before 1953)

in Bolkhovitinov, interview, 21 March 1991. 96 Shlepakov, interview, 29 August 1991; and Leshchenko, interview, 23 July 2012. 97 Sergei Burin, Vadim Koleneko, and Marina Vlasova, interviews with the author,

18 April 1992 . 98 Fursenko, interview, 19 March 1991.


culture, history, economy, technology. And many future Soviet Americanists developed their first professional interest in American studies and love for American modern culture after watching these cinematic stories about the unhappy love of gangster Eddie for beau-‐‑tiful Jean during the Prohibition era. Many of them developed a real fixation [zatsiklilis´] on American trophy films, watching them many times and trying to imitate the behavior, fashions, etc. of these films’ main characters.99 As we can see, the phenomenon that cultural anthropologists and sociol-‐‑

ogists term “cultural fixation” became one of the factors influencing the post-‐‑war generation of Soviet Americanists. According to cultural sociologists, in societies with strong ideological controls the limited information on foreign cultural practices always produce “an intense idealization” of the early avail-‐‑able forms of such practices. In the closed society of the post-‐‑war Soviet Union, the literature, music, and films of “an important, but limited range were seized upon early on and became the central objects” upon which sub-‐‑sequent cultural practice was based.100 American trophy films became a point of cultural fixation for young Soviets, future students of American studies, who felt the exaggerated cultural significance of these products.

By 1953 Bolkhovitinov, like many of his future Americanist colleagues, such as Arbatov, Sivachev, Shlepakov, and Ivanov, was already familiar with American popular culture. Like many Soviet intellectuals of his generation, he “undertook the long road of learning about American culture at a dis-‐‑tance.”101 Hollywood films, jazz, and American literature gave important information about the United States to this post-‐‑war generation. As Joseph Brodsky noted in one of his interviews, the history of free-‐‑thinking in the Soviet Union began with the Tarzan films.102 Some scholars who have studied the history of this generation have demonstrated how, during the 1940s and 50s, the screen images of Tarzan and the adventurous pirates from American films taught Soviet children “the first lessons of individual freedom as an ab-‐‑solute value, while cowboys and sheriffs from Western films showed a model of personal responsibility and what Joseph Brodsky later called ‘momentous

99 Bolkhovitinov, interview, 21 May 2001. 100 See a definition of this concept in Thomas Cushman, Notes from Underground:

Rock Music Counterculture in Russia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 43. I used this concept in my previous book, Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City, 8, 17, 139, 140.

101 I quote Lev Losev, Iosif Brodskii: Opyt literaturnoi biografii (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 2008), 184.

102 Solomon Volkov, Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim. (Мoscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1998), 107–8.

286 Sergei I. Zhuk

justice.’”103 Simultaneously American jazz and Vertinskii’s songs strength-‐‑ened this notion of personal independence, of individual autonomy, which shaped the entire imagination and perception of the outside world for this generation.104

In Conclusion

The first generation of Soviet experts in American studies created the first schools of Soviet students to become interested in studies of North American countries rather than of the West European countries traditionally popular among Soviet scholars. Scholars such as Lev Zubok and Aleksei Efimov, to-‐‑gether with their students Georgii Arbatov and Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, con-‐‑tributed to the founding and development of the first official centers for the study of the United States and Canada in Moscow. According to their mem-‐‑oirs and the observations of their contemporaries, the most important influ-‐‑ence on their decision to study the United States came from World War II and the awareness of America’s important role as the main ally of the Soviet Union. For many Soviet intellectuals—not only for those who fought in the war, but also for those who grew up during the 1940s—the United States symbolized the great friendship of two great nations and their victory over fascism and “international reaction.”105 Unfortunately, the understanding of the United States among the first post-‐‑war generation of Soviet Americanists

103 Losev, Iosif Brodskii, 184. 104 For the best book about this generation in English, see Zubok, Zhivago’s Children,

41, 374. Zubok quotes Brodsky’s phrase that Johnny “Tarzan” Weismuller’s guttural jungle yell “did more for de-‐‑Stalinization than all of Khrushchev’s speeches.” He also cites a famous phrase by Vasili Aksenov about the influence of Hollywood films on Soviet children after the war: “There was a time when my peers and I conversed mostly with citations from those films. For us it was a window into the outside world from the Stalinist stinking lair.” See Vasili Aksenov, In Search of Melancholy Baby (New York: Random House, 1987), 15.

105 See Bolkhovitinov’s writings, especially “The Study of United States History,” 1221–42, and “How I Became a Historian,” 103–14; Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 295–328; and Leonid Leshchenko and Ihor Chernikov, “Vsesvitnio vidomyi vitchyznianyi uchenyi: Istoryk-‐‑miznarodnyk, organizator nauky i diplomat. Do 80-‐‑litia vid dnia narodzhennia akademika NAN Ukrainy Arnol´da Mykolaivycha Shlepakova (1930–1996 rr.),” in Mizhnarodni zv´iazky Ukrainy: Naukovi poshuky i znakhidky. Vypusk 19: Mizhvidomchyi zbirnyk naukovykh prats, ed. S. V. Vidnians´kyi (Kiev: Institut istorii NAN Ukrainy, 2010), 27. Cf. recent studies of this Soviet generation in Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Zubok, Zhivago’s Children; and Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation. See Fürst’s interview with Soviet Russian Americanist historian Robert Ivanov on pp. 61, 83.


remained very shallow. A majority of these first professional Soviet Ameri-‐‑canists were burdened by the Marxist belief system, image structures, and categories of analysis. They suffered from a great deal of cognitive disso-‐‑nance and simply looked for evidence to confirm their preconceived images of how the United States functioned.106

The first Soviet Americanists were fascinated with the products of Ameri-‐‑can popular culture. These products became available after the war and, par-‐‑adoxically, not only functioned as constituent elements of the “imaginary modernity” that young Soviet intellectuals saw as a possible road for post-‐‑war socialist reality but also triggered their interest in the study of U.S. his-‐‑tory, culture, and politics.

From the beginning, the creation and institutionalization of American studies in the Soviet Union was directly connected to Soviet intellectuals’ perception of socialist modernity and the limits of its “openness.” As Volodymyr Yevtukh, a Ukrainian Americanist and politician, noted in December 1995,

to be a Soviet Americanist, a Soviet expert in U.S. and Canadian his-‐‑tory, meant to be a very special, real modern scholar who was differ-‐‑ent from the boring and traditional scholar, an official Communist expert of the Soviet past and Soviet realities. […] Everybody under-‐‑stood that despite all our official anti-‐‑Americanism in the Soviet Union, for us, Soviet intellectuals, American civilization symbolized the modernity of humankind as a whole. According to Communist ideology, the Soviet Union was also a modern, progressive civiliza-‐‑tion. That is why we, Soviet scholars, studied the United States not only to criticize Americans, but also to learn from American experi-‐‑ence how to be a part of modernity. At the same time to study Amer-‐‑ica was for us an attempt to avoid our Soviet “closedness” and associ-‐‑ate with “open” Western civilization.107 More than 90 percent of former Soviet Americanists whom I have inter-‐‑

viewed since the 1990s in both Russia and Ukraine acknowledged how attractive the images of modernity (sovremennost’) and ideas of cultural and technological progress were for them; they always considered the United States and the English language as a signifier of connections to American modernity, to the “opened” Western world. The first post-‐‑war generation of Soviet intellectuals, “Stalin’s last generation,” according to Juliane Fürst, or “Zhivago’s Children,” according to Vladislav Zubok, a generation, whose

106 Cf. similar developments among Chinese Americanists in David Shambaugh,

Beautiful Imperialist: China Perceives America, 1972–1990 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 283.

107 Volodymyr B. Yevtukh, interview with the author, 15 December 1995.

288 Sergei I. Zhuk

representatives became the founders of the first Soviet schools of Amerikanis-‐‑tika in Moscow and Kiev, grew up under the influence of the controversial images of the United States as a Soviet ally in World War II and as a progres-‐‑sive modern country that developed forbidden but very popular trends and fashion, especially in music and films.108 All subsequent generations of Soviet Americanists from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s were influenced by similar images, sounds, and ideas of the Western modernity they associated mainly with the United States.109

To some extent, the Soviet Americanist’s entire identity was built around this notion of Western (American) modernity and its English linguistic ex-‐‑pressions. To select the field of American studies was to attempt to be sovremennyi (modern), progressive, “cool.” For many of them, the choice of academic discipline was also connected to certain material privileges—travel abroad, access to Western (especially American) cultural products, etc. To be an Americanist was to be “a very special [osobennyi] scholar, to be ahead of the times, to be an agent of intellectual progress, part of the open world [chastitsa otkrytogo mira].”110 And their association with American popular modern culture, especially with movies and music, became the most im-‐‑portant part of the identity of the agents of intellectual progress in the Soviet Union.

Ball State University

[email protected]

108 Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children. Cf. Losev, Iosif Brodskii. 109 For further details, see Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City. 110 I quote Bolkhovitinov’s letter to me of 12 December 1988. According to British

scholars, the “human self is envisaged as neither the product of an external sym-‐‑bolic system, nor as a fixed entity which the individual can immediately and directly grasp; rather the self is a symbolic project that the individual actively constructs out of the symbolic materials which are available to him or her, mate-‐‑rials which the individual weaves into a coherent account of who he or she is, a narrative of self-‐‑identity.” See John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 207, 210.

Inventing America on the Borders of Socialist Imagination: Movies and Music from the USA and the...

Documents

Transcript of Inventing America on the Borders of Socialist Imagination: Movies and Music from the USA and the...